This is my report on my trip to Devoxx Belgium conference. My last visit to Belgium coincided with the publication of Java EE 7 Developer Book in 2013. Three years ago is long time in the technology. So what has changed in Belgium in the meantime? The threat level of security is the obvious thing, there were many army soldier patrols in Antwerp and elsewhere in the nation. However there is no interruption whatsoever as the ordinary citizen went about their daily business.

When I arrived at the Antwerp Kinepolis#1 on Monday to register and pick up badge. As I pushed the outer door there was an G4S security guards, and they asked to check inside my laptop bag and camera bag. I will also say in the UK, we see often armed police and soldiers patrols at the airports, train stations and busy port, especially, when there are periods of higher than normal threat levels.

Kinepolis Antwerp

If you have never been to Devoxx, then it is held in a Antwerp subsurb inside a massive cinema complex called the Kinepolis. It is quite convenient to the number 6 tram line as there is nearby stop called Metropolis. You can understand why the conference organiser and founder Stephan Janssen had the brainwave to call the very conference as Javapolis. It is long story why he had to change and rebrand the title to Devoxx. That story is for another time.

Impressions

The format of the conference was mainly better than I how I remembered it. There are two university days followed by two and half days of conference day. It seems to me there were similar size of the conference to yesteryear. There were lots of attendants, and queues to several session. There heavy queues of waiting people outside of Venkat Subramanian talk, Reactive Programming. There several sessions that were full very quickly. People wanted to hear about Java 9 tooling, machine learning and also general web technology such CSS and Flexbox.

Inspirations

My inspiration was Hubert Sablonniere‘s talk on CSS Flexbox. I liked this talk, because of the real world and instant demonstrations. I am reminded of the Bret Victor’s video online called Inventing on Principal. I believe the best software development experiences especially are iterative, creative and empirical.

My second inspiration was TypeScript and AngularJS 2.0 talk by Antonio Goncalves and Sébastien Pertus. You might think it is weird for Java and Scala software engineer to be intrigued by what is essentially front-end technology, which is the type of skill for an Interface Developer. Unless you have ever worked inside a Digital team, then it might be lost on you, because so much of the success of server side developer rests with the emotional intelligent understanding and feeling of working with a top HTML5/JavaScript/CSS coder. Just comprehending the difficulties of what your work mate or colleague is fighting, makes you look good and approachable in a team. I have heard the term “mechanical sympathy” in a performance tuning situation, how about a new team “engineering people sympathy”Antwerp Kinepolis#2 .

Digital

Since leaving the horrible industry that is called investment banking, in 2013, I realised that plenty of interest in web technology. However, Digital, does not equate to simple web as in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Rather it is the realisation that there is a movement focus on the transformation of entire business from the traditional model of papers, files and people to an online, agile and sustainable business. I call this digital transformation.

On the subject of performance engineering, It was an absolute pleasure to hear the legendary Cliff Click give two great talks on Java. I thought these two rare talks for any conference in Europe set Devoxx apart from even JavaOne, San Francisco.

I also was impressed by the attendance in the Microprofile talk. I felt that the audience were appreciative of the new initiative in Java EE. As David Blevins, repeated that the initial JSRs were deliberately restricted to JAX-RS, CDI and JSON-P in order to get something out of the door. Andy Gumbracht, also of Tomitribe, help put the sample application together with the other Java EE providers including IBM, Payara and Red Hat. You should got a check it out and build the software yourself at Microprofile.io.

It was a heart warming that Paul and Gail Anderson were pushing the JavaFX user interface story onto Mobile devices and beyond. Indeed, their university talk was the first session I reached for at Devoxx. It is reasonably straightforward to build a JavaFX application that targets iOS and Android and that something is good, since I was last involved with JavaFXAntwerp Kinepolis#3 .

JavaFX

Since the year 2012, I had to put any interest in JavaFX on the backburners. I became a technical book author and wrote to Java EE books in the meantime. However, I am very glad that people like Johan Vos still fly the JavaFX flag with his company Gluon.

Disappointments

I was disappointed by some of the delivery of a few talks. The talk on Swift on the server side cloud started very slowly, I thought it required a bit more funk, spice and the introduction level could have been faster. I watch a Scala talk about Adoption and again the pace was a little slow. There needed to be part where the speaker would cut to the chase and the main point faster. The quality was good, but it could have been a lot better with more edits and independent review of the material.

Improvements

Unfortunately, I tried the conference official food on Monday. I choose the chicken salad. I couldn’t eat the other choice. I had to bail for the rest of the week to the Quick burger restaurant just around the corner. So the food is still the same quality. I suppose there is always an underside. I would rather accept the lack of food as trade off for the high quality of technical sessions, the location in Europe and, of course, the knowledgeable people who attend this fabulous conference.

Directions

These were the future directions:

Machine Learning

Ratification of Micro-Service Oriented Architecture (M/SOA) interest

Web technology beyond Java that includes frond-end technology

Increasing interest about Java 9 and modularisation

Community Stuff

The closing keynote took place on Thursday evening and it was the Java Council podcast. During the entertaining hour, Simon Maple with the help of Bruno Souza put together a tribute to the fellow Java Champion, Daniel deOliveira. He died from an heart attack a week before. Simple asked the attendances all to stand for a minutes applause just like the Italian football fans do. It was a moving tribute to a determined man, who had he lives on to an old age, could have been ultimately Java’s greatest ever pedagogist. Daniel Oliveira was helping and studying with Michael Koelling at Kent University#4 in south east England, when he unfortunately left these shores and set sail to the West.

Michael Koelling is the author and founder behind Project Green Foot, which is a special education software development application that introducing Java programming to new learners. Green Foot is opensource educational software designed to make learning programming easy and fun. Greenfoot built on top of the NetBeans Rich Client Platform and it runs on JVM. Daniel deOliveira was pursing a PhD with Michael Koelling when he tragically passed away.

I also attended the Java Community BOF on Thursday night, which was hosted by Patrick Curran, who is chair of the Java Community Process. I was really glad that there were new faces here, who might become JCP members. It is now easier to become a JCP Associate member as an individual. Of course, Patrick Curran told us that it was best to do this through a Java User Group. He has had an interesting opinion on the march of the robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Could we as developers, designers and architects be facing in our lifetime commodification issues around general programming? Hmm … Who knows see also this Quora question: will computers be able to program themselves in the future?.

"Thank you so much for the training that you have provided for me and members of my team. You are a master of removing people from their comfort zone and enabling them to explore their potential. Those that have attended so far have thoroughly enjoyed the experience whilst leaving with a number of tools that will be invaluable in their work environment."Chris Forrest, Managing Director of UK Financial Services, Microsoft, UK